


the dead don't dream

by distorted_reflection



Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, Gen, Psychedelic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 17:03:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8021971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distorted_reflection/pseuds/distorted_reflection
Summary: A former captain sleeps and sees no dreams.(do you breathe or drown in dreams. are you alive or dead)





	the dead don't dream

You sleep and your nights are full of visions. They are not dreams, merely the future. And the present. And the past. It’s shadows and whispers when you wake, the morning mist burning away under the morning sun, and you do not remember.

Your dreams are starlight and darkness, possibilities of endlessness and creation and you wake screaming. Sometimes. _These are not nightmares_. They are everything. _They are not dreams_. Merely visions. All that is, all that was, all that could ever be. All that could never be. All that could have been. All that isn’t, wasn’t, wouldn't be.

A thousand paths before and ahead and parallel, and in dimensions and directions that have no names. No truth exists and all is true.

You dream of everything, and there is neither truth nor lies in what you see, but when you wake some is reality, past and present and possibly future, and the rest fades away to nothing.

You dream of falsehoods and lies and tricks, nothing possible- but nothing is really impossible, is it.

Sometimes you see yourself, be yourself, control yourself while submerged in a haze of surreality, as you can feel that it is not real, but what is? A dream within a dream within a dream, and you get lost in your head, a labyrinth expanded by knowledge acquired every night, a labyrinth forgotten and inaccessible in the mortal-waking-world where you are no one, or maybe you are nothing yet but one day will be something.

You are a nexus, you think, as you dream and dream and dream.

These visions are tiring, you think as you watch and observe and forget, to begin it all again another night.

Sometimes dreams mirror realities, and you see what you could have been. Sometimes you are with the would-be-god, sometimes you are the one who _will be god_ , sometimes you are far away and by yourself. You stand with everyone, and no one, and with others against others, and good and evil blur and sharpen to reveal that only one side is right, but it has to be forged from those that do not belong on the other sides.

Will you find your own path, traveler? This question rings in your ears in these dreams, to be forgotten and remembered over and over and over.

In the waking world you spin a web that brings all the others together, broken exiles and whole exiles, children with naive certainty in their hearts, and later, old allies-enemies-allies again who know a little of the truth, and you are guided by the shadowy remnants of what you see when you close your eyes (when you are awake far more than when you walk with the rest). Wake-dream-wake, and which is true? You forget, on the edge of falling asleep and waking up; are you leaving or returning?

You often dream of war, blood and dust and ash and pain and screams, a cacophony of chaos and destruction- all that you have seen before. Nothing is new to you, and it is simply tiring and draining and you despair in the carnage that unfolds in all directions around you, as you see vision after vision after vision.

But it is all that is real, and the day is nothing more than an illusion-memory-dream, unreal and unimportant in every way- except your heart is there while your mind is here.

You remember. _You do not dream. These are not dreams._

Sometimes you are a creature of the night and the sky, and never tangle in the affairs of humans, never creating the fulfiller of wishes that warps your mind every dream, this dream, the next. These visions are the best, where you think nothing and everything, where reality is all forests-sky-sea, ice and snow and night, a biting cold you don’t feel and the storm that is all yours.

One dream lasts a thousand years, and it so very real. You live and breathe and fly, unbound and free. Night is your domain and you are alone, lightning coursing around and through you.

The dead are dead, and no monsters prowl alongside you, no aberrations hunt you. Then the dream switches to when you have died early, and events unfold anew in a mirror reality. There is death and death and death, and the thousand year war ends with blood and bones everywhere. The dead howl, and the murdered hiss accusing words at you, for failing to live.

Guilt wakes you, but in the three-dimensional reality you do not see the dreams you leave behind.

And sometimes the dreams are about future choices. Do you run at the light or from it, diving into the darkness, looking for salvation? Darkness and everything made from nothing, an unholy night where the whole are made broken and the wicked appear divine - that is in the past.

What could have been - less than eight broken, more than nine, more live, more die, you are among them, you aren’t, you know or you don’t. The great divergence and indivergence, a change on a scale that means nothing to those who are real, and everything in the dreams that are beyond reality.

_These are not nightmares._

You are in a river and you are sinking, and a woman with long dark hair looks disappointed, and behind her children stand, soldiers that you have made of them. Guilt drags you deeper underneath the river that doesn’t exist, in which you are drowning, and you look up to see a sky empty of stars and full of time, shards of visions all falling down on you and reforming to show you everything.

The bottom of the river is full of corpses and each one is familiar and gruesome, each one dead because of you, and you know this is just a reflection of reality as you can remember it. Or are they real?

You are alive, you remember, you feel the heartbeat of the heart that should not beat, the breaths you needn’t take but must, you live truly now in the dreams and not elsewhere. The beat echoes in the waking world but this is but a dream, _you do not dream_.

You remember everything and nothing, and reality is falling further and further away. You know you are dreaming now, but you can't break away and the corpses choke you, grasp at you, rip you to pieces.

You see death in every dream, but you are already dead and all is dead, yet all you see is more death and death beyond death, and never a reprieve from all the killing, murdering, dying. You curse your creation and wish you never wished for anything. This gift is a torment beyond all. You have no need for visions that you do not remember, dreams that you can only forget engraved in your bones, the weariness, the millenniums and millenniums of the could-have-beens and never-have-beens intruding on every night.

Anarchy, chaos and destruction creep into the perfect order and impeccable control, the system disintegrates as war spreads like an infection, fear and death and pain and more death, everyone dies and it’s your fault. This is the futurepastpresent, what will certainly be, what could have been now and what should have remained in the past, and in your dreams it is never and throughout all of time. _These are not nightmares because you don’t have any dreams._

Every possibility of what could be created, made and unmade and destroyed, pours through you in the dark of the night, and you can see everything, and the truth of your desires is that you desire nothing and everything, and your old wish is fulfilled as the universe fills your head, as time ravels and unravels, as you see every possibility and impossibility, and you are quite, quite mad and yet perfectly sane, for you were born for this and created for this, even though everything was wrong and an accident and you are a dead soul in the living world with broken friends and all your faults plain to see.

You delude yourself into thinking you are a mortal when awake, confident in your abilities, plotting, planning, preparing for the war and the singular future, the crimson darkness shielding you from the truth that every dream brings back. The confident mortal facade falls to reveal a thing that is not mortal because it-exists-and-doesn’t, something twisted to exist-beyond-time-and-in-all-of-it, a single wish gone wrong that was always going to go wrong, because you are the one who creates yourself to span across everything.

You don’t remember in the morning, the choking clawing grasp of the eternity in your dreams and the entirety of infinity etched on the inside of your skull is not real  _because it is all a nightmare, and you don’t have nightmares. These are merely warnings, visions, flights of fancy; you are not dreaming._

**Author's Note:**

> Did this screw with you head as much as with mine?
> 
>  
> 
> I have... no bl**dy clue about what this is supposed to be. But it seems that I wrote it, so might as well post.
> 
> Do review, please. What did you think? Seriously, ANY FEEDBACK IS FINE. I KNOW THIS THING IS F***ING WEIRD.


End file.
